Alice Maybell is a young orphan who has grown up in Wyvern Manor with old Captain Fairfield and his two sons. She has grown into a beautiful young woman with a bright future; but her marriage, and her husband’s secret, will lead her down a dark path.

Today, Irish writer J. Sheridan Le Fanu is remembered of as an early master of horror. In his own day, he would have thought of his work as falling into different genres, with his well-loved ghost stories, like “ Green Tea ,” in one genre, and his “sensation novels,” like Uncle Silas , in another.

In The Wyvern Mystery , the suspense is created not by the Gothic or the macabre, but by the all-too-prosaic secret held by Alice’s husband, and how it grows to threaten both their futures.